Monkey See

Can You Really Dissolve A Guy In A Bathtub? 'Mythbusters' Tackles 'Breaking Bad'

Perhaps you heard that last night, a plucky little drug dealer named Walter White returned to television for his last eight episodes of the award-hoarding Breaking Bad.

But before he began his life of crime, Walter White was a chemistry teacher, and chemistry is what originally made him such a great meth cook. Breaking Bad has always included a lot of science talk, especially in the early days, and the time has come for someone to see whether it holds up.

And by "someone," I mean "Mythbusters."

This particular crossover episode, which airs Monday night at 10:00 on Discovery, is a patently great idea, in part because both shows, while they're wildly different, have a strong stroke of mischief. That may not be entirely obvious, but when you think about why Breaking Bad is great, never forget that creator Vince Gilligan wrote the funny, offbeat X-Files episode "Small Potatoes," with the shape-shifter. Never. And Mythbusters, of course, features experiments designed to determine the plausibility of urban legends, movie scenes, sayings, and claims about history. It's a good match.

Gilligan appears on the Mythbusters episode, along with Aaron Paul, to comment periodically on the findings of Adam and Jamie on the matter of dissolving a person in acid, and Kari, Grant and Tory on the matter of blowing up a room with a handful of stuff that looks like, but isn't, meth.

We could talk about it more, but if it isn't immediately clear to you that having Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman try to figure out whether you can dissolve a person in a bathtub and make the whole thing crash through the floor in a spectacularly disgusting and disastrous splat is a fantastic idea, you need to let your mind run substantially freer with regard to cackling, pork products, and things that are hilariously revolting.